Pacioli as Renaissance man: beyond double-entry bookkeeping

Accounting historians tend to laud Pacioli as the father of double entry book-keeping (DEB). However, not only was the chapter in the Summa on DEB very much a practical side-issue from the main themes of the volume, but the whole book represented only a part of his enormously wide-ranging interests as a typical polymath 'renaissance man'. This paper explores something of this world, and its time. Pacioli was much involved with aesthetics as applied to art and architecture broadly defined, to mathematics, and to the relationships between mathematics and science on the one hand, and the arts on the other. He was a close colleague of many intellectual, artistic and religious (from Popes to Erasmus) leaders of his day. We illustrate the paper with examples from art and architecture, science and mathematics, and explore relationships between religious 'accountability' both Christian/Islamic (e.g. Catholic confession/ usury and Zakat) and pagan (e.g. Ciceronian rhetoric), on the one hand, and business-related accountability on the other, the connection and common strand being a search of an acceptable degree of legitimacy. The particular Italian context of the period, the multi-faceted polymath nature of Pacioli and his circle, and the development of trade and finance, all combine to show the role of accounting as one of the instruments that contributed to the rebirth/rinascimento/renaissance of the human spirit. We raise the question of possible analogy between the small significance of DEB per se within this overall context, and a small significance of numbers per se, whether financial or otherwise, within overall entity governance.